Sales Engineer
Run technical evaluations for the ad teams considering HawtAds. Demo the editor, scope integrations, win deals, and feed the product back what enterprise needs to ship.
About the role
Image models are the product.
HawtAds is bottom-up. Marketing and creative teams trial the editor and convert themselves. The bigger evaluations — the agencies, the in-house teams running creative at scale, the enterprise buyers — need someone technical in the room from the first call.
That is the role. You are the first technical voice every serious prospect hears: discovery, demo, trial setup, integration scoping, security review, redlines. Not a classic enterprise SE pushing slideware — closer to a player-coach who can sit with a customer’s marketing and engineering teams and actually move things.
What you own
The whole stack, end to end.
- Run technical evaluations end-to-end: discovery, demos, trial setup, scoping, security review, contract close.
- Own the demo and trial environments. Keep them honest with the current product — if the demo lies about something, you fix it that week.
- Scope and deliver integrations on real deals: SSO, audit log, asset library wiring, webhooks, custom workflows.
- Sit in on customer calls and turn raw prospect feedback into product backlog the engineering team will actually use.
- Partner directly with the founder on deal mechanics: pricing, security questionnaires, redlines, procurement.
- Build the technical content the next deal needs: docs, sandboxes, security pages, integration guides.
First six months
A real shape, not a fluff list.
Calibrated to real deliverables, not busywork. You ship in week one; the harder ownership questions land later.
- Week 1–2
Sit in on every active evaluation. Run one demo top to bottom. Find one thing in the demo flow that lies about the product and fix it.
- Month 1
Own the pipeline of in-flight evaluations. First integration scoped and shipped on a real deal.
- Month 3
Trial-to-paid conversion has moved. You have rewritten at least one demo and shipped one integration that closed a deal.
- Month 6
Sales engineering is a defined surface, not a heroics function. Every serious prospect hears you first, and the playbook you wrote is what unblocks the next hire.
What you bring
Required.
- 3+ years in sales engineering, solutions, or pre-sales for a developer or SaaS product. You have closed real deals, not just supported them.
- You have run an evaluation from first call to signed contract and you can walk us through one.
- Comfortable in the browser dev tools, writing small scripts, reading API docs, and debugging webhooks live on a call.
- You write well. Prospects read what you send before they meet you.
- You know how to disqualify. Time on a bad-fit deal is gone for good.
- Comfortable owning the deal mechanics: scoping calls, pricing conversations, security questionnaires, redlines, procurement.
Nice to have
Helpful, not required.
- Background in advertising, marketing operations, or creative tooling.
- You have shipped product before — the line between SE and engineering is thin here, PRs welcome.
- Public-facing presence: talks, writing, community work.
- Early-stage experience where the SE role bleeds into marketing engineering and customer education.
- You have built a sandbox environment or interactive demo that closed deals.
Stack you will touch
Honest list, no buzzwords.
You do not need to have used all of these. You need to be the kind of engineer who picks them up fast.
- Product
- Next.js, TypeScript, Prisma, Postgres
- Integrations
- REST + webhooks, Stripe, Better Auth, R2
- CRM
- HubSpot
- Demos
- Loom + per-prospect sandbox tenants
- Docs
- Markdown in-repo
- Observability
- Sentry, PostHog
How hiring works
Short loop. Real work.
We do not run gauntlets. The process is calibrated to give us both real signal without wasting weeks of your life.
- Apply
Send a CV plus a short note: walk us through one evaluation you ran end-to-end — what you scoped, what you cut, what closed. No cover letters.
- Intro
45 min with the founder. We talk about what you would own, why now, and whether we are mutually serious.
- Deep dive
A take-home, around 4 hours: scope and respond to a real prospect brief we have run before. You will present it back to us.
- Onsite (remote)
Two sessions: a live demo of HawtAds to a mock prospect (we play the prospect), and a conversation about the deal motion you would build.
- References + offer
Two references of your choosing. Offer follows within a week of the onsite.
Sound like you?
Apply for Sales Engineer.
Send a short note about one image-model decision you have shipped. That is what we read first.